


The Woman in Heels

by orphan_account



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-15
Updated: 2016-10-30
Packaged: 2018-08-15 03:32:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8040841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Joss taps her lips. “Impressive,” she says. “Let’s see if I can keep up, then. You could’ve gotten Anton’s name when you picked his pocket during the fight, but even someone as stupid as Anton has been trained out of carrying anything linking him back to his old man. So I’m thinking you have to have known Seamus already, known about his business and why the NYPD might be paying attention to him and his family. He an old boss of yours, or did he hurt someone you care about?”   “Maybe I just like knowing where I could get a gun in under half an hour,” says the woman, face unreadable. An AU where Finch recruits Shaw before John.





	1. Vigilante

**Author's Note:**

  * For [paenteom](https://archiveofourown.org/users/paenteom/gifts).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a belated birthday gift for one of my absolute favorite people in the world! I usually don't post fics before I'm finished with them, but I wanted to post this before next year so I compromised.
> 
> This chapter covers episodes 1x01 "Pilot"-1x07 "Witness".

Despite the phrase that will come to define her in the place of a proper name, the woman isn’t wearing heels when they first meet. She’s not wearing heels and her hair isn’t sleek and her eyes might still say _I’m dangerous_ , but it’s in a feral way that lets Joss miss the steel underneath. Joss sees how she’s bitten her cuticles through to the blood enough times for scabs to fight each other for space on her fists, sees the way her skin is still naturally brown instead of leathered from the sun and her hair is still healthy beneath the frizz and grime, and she thinks, _Oh, I know what’s going on here_.

So she goes into the room and sits across the table from her and doesn’t smile, because she wouldn’t trust anyone smiling at her in a situation like this, her first few months out. Plays the tape. The woman watches it and there’s nothing. Not even a flicker. Joss wonders what her blood-alcohol concentration is, or if it’s some other substance dulling her emotional responses.

Later, she’ll think it was training.

Even later than that, she’ll know it was just her.

“You know, if those guys had come up at me like that, I don’t know if I’d stop at a few broken noses,” she says. Conversational. Light. Create a connection between yourself and the subject right away, position yourself as being on the same side. Cooperative, not competitive. Everyone’s looking for a connection, they told her in training. Everyone’s looking for another island’s light, telling them they aren’t alone.

The woman doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even twitch. Even at the time, Joss had noticed that. She should have been twitching. The profile Joss had been working from would be twitching.

“Question for you,” Joss says. She doesn’t really have a question. She’s laying out her cards. “Looking at that tape, I’d say you spent some time in the service. But you don’t learn to fight like that in the regular army. So what were you, Special Forces? Delta?” She waits the appropriate beat, then nods. “I’m Carter. You didn’t give us a name.”

“You want a name?” Her voice is soft. Not like she wants people to lean in to hear it, but like she knows that if they don’t listen well, they’re the ones that’ll regret it. “Anton O’Mara. Son of Seamus O’Mara. Weapons dealer, gang leader, all around bad guy. But I’m guessing you knew that already. They don’t waste trained interrogators on public disturbances. You’ve got task force written all over you. Organized crime or homicide?”

Joss taps her lips. “Impressive,” she says. “Let’s see if I can keep up, then. You could’ve gotten Anton’s name when you picked his pocket during the fight, but even someone as stupid as Anton has been trained out of carrying anything linking him back to his old man. So I’m thinking you have to have known Seamus already, known about his business and why the NYPD might be paying attention to him and his family. He an old boss of yours, or did he hurt someone you care about?”

“Maybe I just like knowing where I could get a gun in under half an hour,” says the woman, face unreadable.

“I don’t think Seamus sells to people he hasn’t vetted,” Joss says. She’s absolutely sure he doesn’t. It’s part of the reason their planned sting operation is so slow getting off the ground. 

“Never said I’d be paying him,” the woman says.

“In this theoretical scenario,” Joss prompts. “Where you need a gun in under thirty minutes. That’d have to be a pretty serious situation, then, since you clearly have no trouble defending yourself with whatever is handy.” She nods at the surveillance tape, which is frozen on an image of the woman smashing the teeth of one of Anton’s goons into the subway pole. It had sent a nice blood splatter across the safety precautions posted behind them.

“New York is a dangerous city,” the woman says, lip curling up slightly. “Never know what kind of people you might run into out here.”

“You never did answer my question about where you got your training.”

The woman leans forward across the table. “I could tell you, but then they’d have to kill you,” she says and smiles, the easy grin of a flirt in a bar or a spider to a fly.

Joss is denied the chance to formulate a response to that when the door to the station bursts open and a man who screams _high class attorney_ strides in. His suit is well fitted, his hair tightly combed, and he doesn’t look intimidated in the slightest by Joss, the row of beaten up gang members, or the woman.

“I’m here for my client,” he says, pointing at the woman, and Joss doesn’t need to sit through the next five minutes of vaguely threatening legal jargon to know the interview is over and she has nothing, nothing to show for it. The woman hadn’t even touched the water cup they’d given her, keeping her hands tucked inside her sleeves. She lets the lawyer open the door on the way out. She doesn’t want them to have her prints.

She doesn’t want them to have her prints, she’s with it enough to know how to avoid giving them, she looks like she’s spent the last few months trying to dive into the bottom of a bottle and drown herself in it, yet shows no signs of alcoholism or any other substance abuse beyond the surface level, and she has a lawyer that looks more suited to getting the latest trust fund frat boy out of a DUI than taking on a homeless woman’s self defense case pro bono.

She watches from the door as the lawyer guides his supposed client to a limousine and a group of bodyguards that look well paid enough to know what they’re doing. They exchange a few words, and the woman gets in. 

As the car pulls away, Joss wonders what the hell she stumbled into this time.

—

The first time she actually hears the phrase, she’s on her way into the precinct after meeting Taylor for lunch. Terney has some guy in cuffs, a CI maybe, marching him out the door, but he grins when he sees her.

“You hear about your pal Anton?” he says, sounding delighted. 

“No,” she says, pausing on the steps and trying to keep the sigh out of her voice. She can imagine plenty of possibilities, none of them less work for her.

“Him and his father tried to buy some guns. Wound up getting shot by their own merchandise.”

“Are they dead?” Joss asks. It wouldn’t be the first time one of the more minor gun runners in the city was taken out in a deal gone bad. There’s too many powerful players in NYC for the weaker ones to mess up and stick their noses out. Then again, Seamus had usually taken more care than that, idiot son aside.

“Nope, though Anton’s not gonna be holding any kind of a gun for a while,” Terney says, miming a smashing motion with his free hand. “And they’re all pretty embarrassed. Got taken out by one woman. In heels.” He shakes his head in wonder and then, perp gossip done, continues on his way while Joss runs through all the female players in town and tries to figure out who it could be.

Not so long after, she’s putting a crooked cop in the back of a car, a conspiracy complete with a corrupt assistant DA and a dramatic court room reveal falling into perfect puzzle pieces at her feet. Some of those pieces are dead bodies.

“I wanna know about her,” she says when Azarello starts the whole song and dance about how he’s not going to snitch on his friends. “The woman who came after you.”

“I don’t know anything,” Azarello protests, wriggling in her grasp as she puts him in the backseat. “She was just some chick alone in combat boots with heels.”

Joss snorts. “Yeah, well, you're gonna tell me everything that you don't know about her and where I can find her.”

“I’d never seen her before in my life,” Azarello says and keeps up that story the whole way to the precinct. The most Joss can get from him is the basic profile of a woman, short and _maybe Middle Eastern, maybe Latina_ , he didn’t get that good a look at her, he _swears_ , armed to the teeth and more than capable of using every single piece on her, all in black with the aforementioned combat boots.

She shows him a picture of the woman from he subway. He squints at it for a few moments and shrugs.

“Maybe,” he says. “Could be her, but she wasn’t so, uh…”

“Didn’t look like a bum?” Joss asks.

He nods. “But it could be her, I guess.”

Joss has a headache by the time the DA gets in. She sure fucking hopes this one isn’t as corrupt as Hansen.

—

That night, she stops at the Vons to pick up some food for the week. She’s in the cereal section trying to decide between Kellogg’s and General Mills’ versions of Raisin Bran when a hand enters her field of vision, grabbing Lucky Charms off the shelf. Joss goes to step out of the way, turning slightly to see the other shopper.

It’s her. Cleaned up, with a new hair cut and missing the five layers of jackets that had been hiding her body, but the face is unmistakable. 

Joss moves her hand toward her gun.

“Easy,” the woman says. “Buying sugary crap isn’t against the law now, is it?”

“Didn’t expect you to seek me out,” Joss says, shifting her weight on her feet. She prides herself on being good in a fight, but she’s seen enough of this woman’s results to think twice about pushing any sort of physical confrontation. “I have some questions for you. You were the one who did for Anton, and Hansen’s little black book of crooked cops.”

“That didn’t sound like a question.” The woman grabs a box of Cheerio’s, reads the side and snorts, putting it back on the shelf in exchange for a box of Honey Nut. She’s wearing heels just like the witnesses said, though at least they’re attached to combat boots instead of stilettos.

“You fancy yourself some kind of hero? ‘Cause I have a different word for that. Vigilante. It’s not something I take kindly to,” Joss says, thinking about their surroundings. It’s not packed, but there’s more than enough innocent civilians around to tie her hands.

The woman just snorts again. “I’m no hero,” she says. 

“What are you, then?” 

She’s quiet long enough that Joss is wondering if she was wrong about the possible substance abuse, but then she tilts her head. “Did you become a cop because you wanted to save people?”

“I want to protect people,” Joss says, tone sharp. “That includes putting criminals behind bars. Not shooting them and leaving them for other people to clean up. Not killing indiscriminately.”

“That why you joined the service, too?” the woman asks, fingers moving over a box of Frosted Flakes. “I joined because I wanted a purpose.”

“And did you get one?” Joss asks. It’s the closest to opening up she’s gotten from this woman.

“For a little while,” she says, dismissive. “There’s a lot more crooked cops than just the ones you took in today, you know.”

Joss’s nails bite into her palms. “I assumed so. You know something about that?”

“I know something about corruption,” the woman says. “If the head of the NYPD was crooked, what would you do?”

“Build a case, arrest him,” Joss says immediately. “If you could testify against—”

“So you’d still believe in the mission,” she says. “You’d still believe in the bigger plan behind it all.”

“Of course,” Joss says. “Do you have information about the commissioner—“

“I don’t,” the woman says. “It was a hypothetical question.”

“I doubt you ask a lot of purely hypothetical questions,” Joss says with narrowed eyes.

That gets her a flicker of a smile. “You seem like someone with good morals. Never really been my strong suit. Sometimes I have to outsource.”

“Outsource,” Joss repeats.

“I got offered a new job,” the woman says. “Well, it’s kind of like my old job. Maybe a little less relevant.” Her lips twist like she’s making a joke, though Joss misses the humor. “Same boss, though.”

“And who that would be?”

“Apparently, that’s the wrong question to be asking,” the woman says and a man with two kids clinging on to his shopping cart comes between them, grabbing a bunch of cereal.

By the time the man moves off, the woman is gone.

—

Over the next few weeks, Joss hears the phrase _woman in heels_ enough times that she starts tensing up after the first word. She shows up around all sorts of crimes, or almost-crimes. A woman targeted for her inheritance money, a man about to be killed for an affair, a gang planning to kidnap the kid of their rival’s head honcho.

One time, she even gets a call at her desk.

“ _I wanted to thank you for your advice,_ ” the woman says as soon as Joss picks up. She doesn’t even need to ask who it is. 

“I don’t remember giving you any advice,” Joss said. “I remember telling you I don’t take kindly to vigilantes.”

“ _That’s your word for it, not mine_ ,” the woman says, a smile in her voice. “ _I got you a present. To say thank you._ ”

“A present,” Joss says and looks around the precinct, wondering if she ought to clear the room as a precaution in case of a bomb. Some of this investigations crime scenes have been… intense.

“ _I know how much you like protecting people,_ ” the woman says over the phone. “ _So I’m going to give you an address._ ”

When Joss gets there, she finds a girl who has been assumed dead for years and is the newest star witness in the case against the man she says murdered her family.

“My friend told me you were trustworthy,” the girl says. “That you could protect me.”

“Your friend give you a name?” Joss asks. 

The girls shrugs. “Never asked.”

“Hotel staff says they might have seen two people coming and going, but it’s nothing on the surveillance cameras. Was there anyone else helping you?”

“It was a pretty traumatic experience. I don’t remember much at all.”

Joss is starting to get a headache she specifically associates with her mysterious woman in heels and whatever boss she claims to be serving.

—

The bank robbers job is a turning point of a sorts, not that Joss knows it at the time. She just sees it as odd, a break in the pattern. The woman in heels doesn’t want for money, has never worked with so many people before. There haven’t been so many bodies dropping around her lately, either, and at first Joss feels a strange sense of betrayal until she realizes both that it’s ridiculous and also that her gut is saying it’s not her suspect who’s the killer.

She comes away with a video of a ten second exchange between the woman and a little guy at the evidence lock-up robbery, the name Elias, and a 148 military radio that should give her one shot at being the one to initiate contact.

“Can you hear me?” she asks into it, making sure she’s well away from anyone who could overhear her. After the woman had shown up at her grocery store, they’d given her a whole list of rules to follow to avoid a potential stalker situation, but Joss doesn’t think that’s whats going on with this woman at all. “I think you can. Guess you’re out there somewhere, hiding in plain sight. I keep looking for you, I keep finding myself in some bad situations.”

“ _You seem like you can take care of yourself._ ” The radio distorts the woman’s voice, but it’s clearly her. 

“So do you,” Joss says. “Which begs the question of what you were doing with a pack of ex-military bank robbers who clearly couldn’t. I’ve got two more bodies on my hands. Anything you got to say about that?”

“ _There could have been three bodies_.”

“That meant to be a threat?” Joss shakes her head. “No, that’s not really your style. And I don’t think you killed those men, but I think you know who did.”

“ _Don’t worry, Detective_ ,” the radio says. “ _I’ll take care of it_.”

“I’d rather you didn’t. You’re playing a dangerous game and I’m not sure I understand why.”

“ _You don’t need to worry about me_ ,” the woman says. 

“Who should I be worrying about, then?” Joss asks. “Just how is it you pick out which little group of criminals you’re going to throw yourself at next? Because I’ve been looking at it, and the pattern seems to be escaping me.”

There’s a sound of a laugh. “ _You’d have to ask my boss, but I’m afraid getting in contact is easier said than done_.”

“You just go where you’re told, no questions asked? I didn’t peg you for the type.”

“ _Asking too many questions can get people killed_ ,” the woman says. “ _And I should know. It got me killed_.”

Joss adds _Presumed Dead_ to the profile she’s always building. A soldier thought to be killed on mission, perhaps? Someone who faked her death? There’s a side of bitterness in her voice — something in that story was a betrayal. “Hasn’t seemed to slow you down much.”

“ _Got eight more lives left_ ,” the woman says. “ _Not planning on wasting them_.”

“Pretty sure sitting in a jail cell is pretty wasteful of a woman of your talents,” Joss says. “Because that is how this story ends, you know. I lock you up, or find you bleeding out somewhere.”

“ _I’ll take my chances_ ,” the woman says and there’s a crunching sound of the radio being dropped. 

Joss closes her eyes for a moment, then heads into the scene.

—

Just a few days later, the woman shows up in her kitchen, eating Joss’s left over lasagna out of the tupperware and looking at the magnets on the fridge. The window is open, breeze tugging on the few loose pieces of hair around her face.

“Cute,” she says, pointing at the photo of a much younger Taylor cuddling with his grandma’s dog. Joss is pretty sure she means the dog. “You can put that away, you know. I’m not here to cause trouble.”

Joss keeps her gun up all the same. She’s had it out since she got home to the kitchen light on and Taylor meant to be at a friend’s for a sleepover. She’s not sure if it being the woman in heels makes her more or less nervous.

“I don’t suppose you came to turn yourself in?”

The woman rolls her eyes around another forkful of cold lasagna. “My boss is worried about you,” she says. “Thinks you could be trouble.”

Joss has been threatened before. She’s pretty sure her fear doesn’t show on her face. She’s also pretty sure it wouldn’t change a thing with this woman if it had. “This the boss that’s so hard to get ahold of?”

“Nah, not that one,” the woman says. “That one is more of the boss of this boss.”

Three people involved, then, at least. Joss wouldn’t be surprised if there were more due to the sheer amount of intelligence needing to be gathered, but then again, she hasn’t seen anyone else following the strange not-quite pattern of her woman in heels. “Which one of them sent you here, then?” she asks, voice sounding a hell of a lot more sure than she feels.

“Neither,” the woman says. “I just wanted to see you.”

“So you broke into my home,” Joss says. “I know you know my office phone number.”

“Sometimes it’s nice to chat face to face,” the woman says and nods at the kitchen table. “You wanna sit down?”

“I’m good, thanks,” Joss says. 

“Suit yourself,” the woman says, and sits down. She puts her feet up on the chair across from her, same old combat boots as always. Joss wonders if she has multiple pairs, and how much time she spends cleaning blood off of them. “Do you think some people deserve to die?”

“You planning on killing someone?” Joss asks.

“Not me,” the woman says. “Not at the moment, anyway. I’m just asking a question.”

Joss remembers their last in-person conversation. “This another one of your outsourcing morals questions?”

The woman smiles and looks genuinely touched that Joss remembered. It’s the strongest proper emotion Joss has seen on her face since they met. “Something like that.”

“And you’re not going to give me any more information than that?”

The woman shrugs and eats her pilfered lasagna. “You were in the service. Now you’re a cop. You’ve used lethal force before — I read your file.”

“Only when it’s necessary,” Joss says, wishing she could be sure that was absolutely true. “There are rules, guidelines. It’s not one person’s decision, whether someone deserves to live or die.”

“You know it doesn’t always work like that,” the woman says. She frowns down at the table, tracing the grain of the wood with her thumb. She’s wearing gloves, still careful about her prints. “It never used to be up to me. By the time they called me in, well, it’d already been decided. No need for me to think about it at all.”

“Until you started asking questions?” Joss says and now that they’re speaking in person, she can see the way the woman’s lips thin, just a tiny bit, as she prepares to answer.

“I never said it was me asking the questions,” she says, and _oh_. She did lose someone. Joss would bet her life on it. “And that’s not really the point.”

“What is the point, then?” Joss asks and takes a step closer before she’s thought better of it. “I hope you’re not expecting me to tell you that it’s alright for you to kill someone because you think they deserve it. Every killer I lock up thinks their victims deserved it.”

The woman’s eyebrows raise. “Maybe that’s the better question,” she says. “Do you think some people deserve to be killers?”

Joss’s eyebrows knit together. “You’ve lost me.”

“My boss doesn’t like killing either,” the woman says. “You two are a lot alike, you know. Maybe that’s why you worry him.”

Him. A pronoun. It’s not much, but it’s a lead. “I’m not going to take that as a compliment,” Joss says. “Are you asking me if being a killer is all you deserve?”

The woman looks taken aback by that and shakes her head. “I’m already a killer,” she says. “But maybe that’s good enough. It doesn’t matter if she deserves to be, because I already am one.”

“She?” Joss repeats. She’s not sure when this conversation spiraled so wildly out of control, but she feels like they barely speaking the same language anymore.

“I think I got what I needed,” the woman says, nodding at her. “I was right, you are good at this.”

There’s the sound of the door. “Mom?” Taylor’s voice rings out in the hallway. “Eric got sick so his mom brought me back, do we—Mom?”

She’d turned automatically when she heard her son come in, terror ripping through her heart. Now his eyes are fixed on her, the gun in her hand, confusion on his face.

“Mom? What’s going on?” 

She’s not surprised when she turns back around to see that the woman is gone, tupperware abandoned on the table. She walks over to window to look out, but of course, there’s nothing there.

The next day, there’s a coffee waiting on her desk just as she likes it, cream and no sugar. For the next week, every body that comes in she’s expecting to get tied to the woman in heels, but there’s nothing.

It occurs to her that if the woman really wanted to kill someone, there might never be a body to come in.

—

She gets the next call at three in the morning. She’d be irritated if she wasn’t still awake on her own, half waiting for the call. If she’s being honest, she’s been waiting for it ever since she heard that the latest person under the woman in heels’s protection had turned out to be Elias.

“Tell me you didn’t know,” she says in lieu of a greeting. She sounds bone tired even to her own ears, voice catching and dry. “Tell me you weren’t intentionally protecting a mob boss.”

“ _I didn’t know_.” She sounds at least half as tired as Joss does, which is a good start. “ _Our intel wasn’t… we didn’t know._ ” 

“And what intel was that? What kind of intel are you getting, that gets you right in the middle of one of a turf war between the Russia mafia and Moretti’s illegitimate son without knowing who you were even protecting?” The woman starts to respond, but Joss rolls over her, too angry to hear excuses. “You and your bosses, whoever they are, like to play hero, acting like you know more about what’s going on than anyone else could, jumping in and out of situations like you’ve got all the information, but you don’t. This proves you don’t. You had no idea what you were playing with, absolutely none.”

“ _We only knew the same as you did,_ ” the woman says, quiet. “ _Well, not— It’s complicated._ ”

“Let me uncomplicate it for you,” Joss says. “Your boss? Doesn’t know everything. Maybe you think you’re doing good, that you’ve found your purpose again, but I’m telling you, you’re mistaken. You’re just making my job more difficult.”

“ _It’s not that simple_ ,” the woman says, and for the first time, she sound concerned, like Joss’s opinion actually matters to her. “ _You don’t understand._ ”

“Then explain it to me.” She waits a several seconds and smiles wryly into the darkness. “That’s what I thought.”

She hangs up, but the silence doesn't sound half so satisfying as she'd hoped.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next Time:  
> “ _What are you doing_?” Her voice is short, tense with emotion. Joss was almost thinking she didn’t have it in her to sound that truly upset.
> 
> “My job,” Joss says. “Catching people like you. Criminals.”
> 
> “ _No,_ ” the woman says. “ _What are you doing differently, what have you done differently recently? You have to have done something. There has to be a reason why your—_ “
> 
> “Why I what?” Joss asks.
> 
> “ _You’re in danger_.”


	2. Protector

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Joss is in danger and gains a new partner.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this is both so belated and short. I'll try to do better next time ;_;
> 
> This whole fic is for Charlie but this particular chapter is for Charlie's new baby lizard, Tesla.
> 
> It covers episode 1x09 "Get Carter".

When her phone shows a call from an unknown number weeks later, Joss really considers not answering. Whatever she'd thought about their dynamic, whatever naive hope she'd been nursing about being able to get through to the woman, that they were building some kind of understanding, it had been made more than clear enough that she'd been wrong. After their last disastrous conversation, Elias-related cases have been rising like smoke and _Woman in Heels_ cases showed no sign of slowing down. No remorse shown at all.

She picks up anyway.

“ _What are you doing?_ ” Her voice is short, tense with emotion. Joss had almost started thinking she didn’t have it in her to sound that truly upset.

“My job,” Joss says, eyeing the bodega. “Catching people like you. Criminals.”

“ _No,_ ” the woman says. “ _What are you doing differently, what have you done differently recently? You have to have done something. There has to be a reason why your—_ “

“Why I what?” Joss asks.

“ _You’re in danger._ ”

Joss rolls her eyes, pulling her coat tight around her. "I'm a detective," she says. "Tell me something I don't know."

" _This is different,_ " the woman insists, aggravation creeping into her tone. " _Someone is planning to kill you._ "

A shiver rolls up her spine that has nothing to do with rain splattering the pavement around her, but Joss keeps her voice flat, unimpressed. If the woman thinks Joss isn't buying it, she might offer up more. "That so? And you know about this... how?"

" _I've got sources._ "

Joss actually snorts at that. "I'll bet. These the same sources that set you on protecting one of the most dangerous men to ever walk free in New York?"

" _I already told you—_ "

"And I already told _you_.” Suddenly she's tired of this, so tired and done with being treated like this on all sides, by her damn bosses and her damn CIs and her thrice damned ominous suspect gallivanting about the city. "Now, either you give me something concrete, or the only thing I want to hear from you is the address where I can go to make your arrest with full confession."

" _You're making this very difficult._ " 

"Yeah, you're a real martyr." Joss shakes her head and hangs up. She has better things to do, she reminds herself, squaring her shoulders and heading into the bodega.

—

She’s not an idiot, though, so she changes her behavior patterns after that. Starts wearing her vest more, doesn’t take her usual routes in and out of work, makes sure Taylor is well out of it. Regardless of reasoning, the woman in heels always goes hand in hand with violence, so if she says Joss is in danger, she takes it seriously.

She’s not paranoid, but getting a new partner right in the middle of this situation has her internal alarm bells going into overdrive. Coincidences are for dead people, they’d told her in training.

Fusco doesn’t smell right. He has that NYPD old boys attitude that Joss never meshes well with, the kind of slouch that’d fit in at any one of the cop bars that always smell a little stale and go quiet when a black female detective come in the door like they’re waiting for the punchline, but it’s more than just that. It’s how he’s moved over to homicide task force for no real reason she can click to, that the chief looks less than pleased watching him settle in. It’s the slight tremble in his hands when he sets up his kids picture and the way his eyes dart around the precinct when he’s on the phone.

On his own, he’d strike her as slightly slimy. With everything else, she’d wager on him being dirty.

He catches up with her as she’s reviewing video from the night of Ronnie Middleton’s murder, trying to catch Alvarez’s car on the tapes. She can hear him breathing in a few times as if he’s about to speak before changing his mind. She lets him struggle through it, feigning that she hasn’t noticed him approach. She’s interested to see what he’ll come up with.

“I hear you went for a conversation with that DV case perp, Kovach,” he finally says, shifting his weight so he can adopt an ill-advised attempt at casualness in the form of a lean against the desk that only serves to highlight how uncomfortable he looks.

“I may have,” she said, keeping her eyes on the tape even if her focus has shifted. “What’s it to you?”

“I’m your partner,” he says and runs a hand through his short hair. “If you’re going to go around confronting suspects, you gotta bring me with you.”

“Kovach’s not a suspect in anything currently,” Joss says with a frown that’s only half about Fusco. “There’s no case being built against him.” Not at the moment, anyway.

“You know what I mean. We both know he’s a homicide waiting to happen.” 

“I can handle Mr. Kovach.” Joss taps the remote, but Fusco blunders on like he doesn’t even notice the dismissal in her tone.

“It’s not just that,” he says. “You went to go talk to Alvarez on your own, too. He’s a dangerous guy, you know.”

“With insights like that, I’m starting to see why they moved you up to task force,” Joss says as dryly as she can manage. “You got a point, Fusco?”

“It’s not a good idea to go confronting murderers without backup,” Fusco says, leaning in like he’s sharing some priceless bit of intel. “That’s what I’m here for, alright? But I can’t back you up if you leave me behind.”

“I don’t need a babysitter,” Joss says, and hopes the implied _especially not one just as likely to shoot me in the back as protect me_ isn’t as obvious to him as it is to her. “How about you focus on doing your job and worry less about how I do mine?”

“I’m just trying to help,” Fusco grumbles.

“Yeah? Then help me solve the damn case.” She backs up the video to where she stopped paying attention and sets it to playing again. “Let’s start with figuring out how Alvarez got to the bodega without his ride getting caught on any of the security cameras.”

Fusco sighs and settles in to help. He sticks with her through collecting info from Bottle Cap and dealing with Alvarez’s mistress, so she’s with him when they get the report that someone blew up Alvarez’s auto shop. There’s no mistaking the look of frustrated resignation that passes over his features when they get the news.

“You knew,” she says, leaning in so she can loom over him despite his few inches on her. “So what is it? Alvarez stick his nose into some of HR’s business? Drugs? Weapons?”

“HR, what? No!” Fusco leans back into the wall, sweating. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Carter, c’mon!” 

“I’m sure,” she says, and would say more if her phone didn’t go off, dragging her attention away. She pulled flipped it open without looking, keeping her glare pinning Fusco to the wall. “What?”

“ _Stop terrorizing your partner, he had nothing to do with it,_ ” the woman says, sounding amused and more smug than a cat that’s gotten into the cream.

“You did it,” Joss realizes and feels a heavy sigh growing in the back of her throat. She steps away, letting Fusco go in order to gain privacy. “May I ask why?”

“ _You make a lot of enemies, Detective,_ ” the woman says. “ _I can’t be everywhere at once._ ”

Joss raises a hand to press against the center of her forehead like that will stop the cause of her headache. “You did it to try to help me,” she says, her voice fighting to hold steady. “This is part of your whole… thing. Where you think I’m in danger.”

“ _I_ know _you’re in danger._ ” Any humor that had previously been coloring the woman’s voice has disappeared, leaving it clipped. “ _You’ve made an enemies out of HR._ ”

“I figured that, thank you,” Joss says sourly, flicking a glance back at Fusco, who is busy straightening his tie and trying to act nonchalant. “Should I expect them to be your next target?”

“ _They’re too big for me to take on too quickly_ ,” the woman says, sounding so put out about it that Joss can imagine she’s sitting with a rocket launcher just waiting for the opportunity. “ _But you need to be careful. They’ll try to make it look clean, line of duty._ ”

“And you know this how, exactly?” Joss asks.

“ _I know their way of operating_ ,” the woman says. “ _You need to be careful._ ”

“I keep hearing that,” Joss says. “Funny how it keeps coming from people on the wrong side of the law, isn’t it?”

“ _Just keep an eye out_ ,” the woman says. “ _And lay off your partner. He’s not what you think._ ”

“Oh, really? Everyone’s out to get me except the guy who walked in here with all but a flashing sign as a mole of HR?” Joss raises her eyebrows. “Something you know that I don’t? Or…” She looks back at Fusco, the way he’s alternating between tapping at his phone and trying to watch her with a subtlety he lacks, a suspicion growing in her mind.

There’s a beeping noise that signals a second call from a number Joss doesn’t recognize. “Hold on,” she says, as if the woman is likely to listen to her, and switched over. “Hello?”

“ _He’s got a gun!_ ” It’s a woman’s voice, so frantic that it takes Joss a moment to process what she’s saying, adrenaline flooding her system into crisis mode. “ _Oh god, please, he’s gonna kill me! Hurry!_ ”

“Mrs. Kovach, where are you?” 

“ _In the bathroom,_ ” Mrs. Kovach’s voice wobbles dangerously, the sound of a door being hit hard in the background.

“Stay where you are, I’m gonna come and get you,” Joss says, but is met with a dial tone. She hisses frustration even as she’s grabbing the things she needs and motioning at Fusco. Her phone switches back to her original call. “I need to—“

“ _I heard,_ ” the woman says and there’s a sound in the background of a motorcycle warming up. “ _I’m on my way._ ”

“You—“

“ _I’m closer_ ,” the woman says, cutting off any argument Joss was about to make about vigilantism or the fact that she’s pretty sure the woman just admitted to tapping her phone. “ _Doesn’t sound like we’ve got a lot of time_.”

All of Joss’s fight leaves her in a shuddering breath. “Everyone better be alive when I get there,” she says with as much threat as she can.

“ _Your wish is my command._ ”

The static of the phone connection makes it impossible for Joss to tell much sarcasm is layered over the words, but when she gets to the house, Mrs. Kovach is traumatized but unharmed in the bathroom and her husband is alive as promised.

The next few hours are a blur of motion. Alvarez’s girlfriend and mistress give up the info on where he’s hiding out and enough evidence to take him down, Kovach is arrested, and in the midst of it all, someone delivers a bouquet of lilies to the station with a card expressing condolences on Joss’s death. She grits her teeth even as she dumps them in the bin. If HR or Elias or whoever thinks she can be scared off so easily, they don’t know her at all. She doesn’t hesitate when calling in an assault on Alvarez’s warehouse, not even with Fusco buzzing around her. 

The raid goes well, really well, and Joss is able to give Fusco the slip during the paperwork that comes afterward so she can go meet Bottle Cap by herself to give him a down payment on the good intel.

He’s off from the second she gets there, jumpier than when he was still an addict, at first upset and then overly solicitous about taking the money. 

“I’m sorry, Carter,” he says, distress around his eyes. “You’ve always been good to me, but I ain’t got no choice… You told me to find that guy Elias? Well, I found him.”

Joss just has a second to register the gun in his hand before there’s the sound of three shots in quick succession, making her stumble back before she registers the lack of pain, of any force beyond her own pushing her. She hasn’t been hit.

Instead, it’s Bottle Cap who goes down, groaning and dropping the gun to clutch his leg. Training taking over, Joss kicks the gun clear of him before turning, already knowing who she’s going to see.

“Glad I made it in time,” the woman says, heels clicking as she takes a step forward, shadows of the alley resolving themselves into her compact frame swathed in a dark coat. “You okay?” The streetlights reflect oddly off her expression, adding a touch of anxiety around her eyes that Joss has trouble reconciling.

“You were following me,” Joss says, knowing she’s stating the obvious. Her blood is still pounding through her veins from the moment where she thought Bottle Cap was about to shoot her. Vest or not, at this short of a range he would have done some damage even if he wasn’t careful to finish her off with a headshot. Joss can taste the acid of fear in the back of her mouth. It ought to be climbing even higher with the woman in heels in front of her, holding a gun at her side, but Joss’s adrenaline doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo on that. It’s fading into a softer hum by the moment. 

“I told you that you were in danger,” the woman says. “I couldn’t let anything happen to my favorite detective.” She smiles at that, sharp and slightly lopsided, not quite matching the falsely flirtatious purr of her voice.

Joss is quiet for a beat, just letting that hover in the air between them. “You know this doesn’t change anything,” she says. “I’m still a cop, and you’re still a criminal.”

“I know,” the woman says, eyes crinkling. “You’ll arrest me if you get a chance. But I’m still going to have your back, detective. I hope you believe me.” Sincerity is hard to make out in her voice, so level and practically shrouded in the same shadows that hide her expression, but Joss has always been good at picking out hints that go unnoticed by most people.

“I don’t understand you,” Joss says and shakes her head, hardly believing what she’s about to say. “I believe you, but I don’t understand you.”

“I’ll take it,” the woman says with the soft tone of genuine pleasure. She tucks her gun away and turns, letting Joss have a free aim at her back as she leaves the alley. 

Joss watches her go for a second before turning back to Bottle Cap. She has to arrest him, get him medical attention, then see what information he got about Elias that got him so spooked he went from a good informant to trying to kill her. It’ll be a long, long night, she realizes, to cap off a long, long day.

But she’s alive, and she’ll take it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next Time:  
> Joss looks down at the photo. It shows a pale, thin man with traces of boyhood still clinging to his face, smiling at something off camera while the wind mixes up his hair. “Who’s this?” she asks.
> 
> “Michael Cole,” Wilson says and slides a second picture over. This one shows a body in the morgue, boyish face turned pallid. “Shot over eight times in the back by Shaw right before she went rogue. They’d been partners for two years.”
> 
> “Why are you telling me this?” Joss asks, looking up from Cole’s face.
> 
> Wilson doesn’t blink. “Because Shaw is a very dangerous woman, and we think you’re the key to bringing her in.”


End file.
